Practice Research Advisory Group

alison gibb

Poetic Matter is a collaborative practice-based
project that exists to think through and to articulate the concerns that we
face in our practices through an ongoing inter-disciplinary dialogue around the
role of performance in the making and showing of work.

By working in collaboration, we are able to
share research concerns and research questions from our individual practice
areas such as dance making, visual arts, writing and performing poetry to approach
a current problem. We often begin with questioning what performance is and what
it could be in order to shape our investigation. The performance and the creation
of the work co-exist as our collaborative practice, our method of creating
practice from research and as our method of developing research methods from
our practice. Live performance is for us
another mode of our practice. We don’t see it as a final event or as our final
outcome. However, it is important for us to present our practice investigations
in a performative way. The performance
is a way of bringing our questions into focus in the present and live moment of
performance. Each performance work generates further research questions and outcomes
in other forms of practice including drawings, diagrams, movement exploration
and working with different forms of body and voice work.

In this article we reflect on how we
treated practice as research in developing our recent multi-media performance
work Making S P A C E S: a poetic
response.[i]

Our primary sources for devising performed
elements for this work were two books on forestry practice from which we
borrowed concepts of planting, harvesting, clearing and sky-lining (a method of
using ropes and pulleys to fell trees). These forestry concepts were used to
generate movement material, texts, sound and film. The instructions for forest
management from these books became elements that we could think about conceptually
in order to create a performance space. For example, we used ‘harvesting’ as a
concept to create the third part of our performance, where Alison projects
diagrams of harvesting drawings on to Elaine, as she performs choreography
created in response to harvesting. The soundtrack that accompanies this section
of the piece is made up of the sounds of trees being felled and of sounds of harvesting
machinery.

Q. How does the research project begin?

ET: In Making S P A C E S: a poetic response, some of our starting questions were: What makes a performance? What does it mean to perform? How can the interaction of different elements, movement, spoken word, film, create a texture in live performance? Can concepts of forestry practice be realised spatially? However, we quickly departed from the initial questions to follow aesthetic lines of inquiry.

The way we
respond to starting materials, such as the forestry books, text, images and
diagrams, may take us in any direction but we do keep referring back to the
original source in the movement, images and text that we make in response. The research questions provide the context for
the work we produce; they help gather the different elements together.

Methods of
production for the work provide another mode of enquiry. For example, I edited
the sound piece from sound samples of a sawmill and tree felling as well as a
recording of my voice murmuring some sounds from Kerouac’s Sea. In the edit these sounds were stretched, repeated, and layered
to create different densities and rhythm. This method of producing sound is
echoed in the methods used for generating movement. I used diagrams from the forestry
practice book to make a series of movements. Alison directly responded to these
movement sequences by placing markers in tape on the floor that correspond and
joined these markers to create a diagram of the shared spatial investigation.
The taped diagram then became another stimulus for further movement and text. Similarly,
the movement I generated as well as existing text from the forestry books are reflected
and responded to by Alison in creating some of the poetic text, which is then
again layered with movement and sound in the live performance. These methods of
production are present in the live performance and shape how the work comes to
exist. We are interested in how the method of making something can also be a
questioning of how to work collaboratively and in how to treat the various
elements that we bring to the process.

‘I crossed the body to mark the area’

AG: Our processes become the content and context for the performance. For this project we produced a lot of initial response elements to get our ideas going and to create methods of collaboration. For example, I began by responding to a series of tabulated information pages from one of the forestry book through a process of scoring, annotation and drawing. The information in the tables explained forestry practice methods including suitable conditions for planting, water supplies, soil types and assigned processes for planting and maintaining forests. Once I had determined a set of annotations, I applied them to the tabulated pages to create new visual and verbal scores from the forestry information. I also gave Elaine a set of the pages and the system of annotations and had her score her own responses. We went on to use the scores as textual resource materials for writing poems and texts, as visual aides and as reference material throughout our studio practice.

Another early response was to independently gather video, film and photographic images of trees and forests to share with each other at our second studio session. The outcomes from these visual investigations provided us with strategies to select and to edit our video footage into the three video work elements of the piece. Hence, our research response elements became the visual, verbal and choreography tools that we developed through our collaborative practice to perform the operations of our ‘live performance’.

‘—To look at it in an another way—one finds that aspects of—’

Q. What transitions does the research go
through?

ET: The large question of ‘what is performance?’ and ‘what does it mean to perform?’ will be addressed through some imaginative engagement with the forestry drawings, for example. The diagrams give some markers for staging, and from my perspective, for movement material. Through this movement I am exploring new ways of addressing these questions but also allowing new things to come through. The text that Alison works on is also a conduit for this process. It gives me other possibilities for expanding and developing the movement and to think through something spatially.

‘To feel experience before an act of language’

AG: Our research goes through many stages of transition. For example, by taking forestry practice and planting as a basis for developing conceptual frameworks and for gathering materials for performance, we were able to begin to explore spatial practices of ‘harvesting’ and ‘clearing’ and the method of ‘sky-lining’ as sites for thinking, making and performing choreography. For example, Elaine created some choreography inspired by the ‘harvesting’ as a conceptual method to occupy and mark out space for performance through her movement. I responded to watching Elaine work by placing markers of tape on the floor to correspond with her contact with the ground. Once I had finished plotting a selection of her movements, I taped the marks together to create a diagrammatical documentation of our shared spatial investigation. Once drawn, the diagram remained throughout the performance, adding to the layers of visual and verbal elements that we present within the piece. Thus, to investigate ideas of performance and to make ready a space for performance through modes of performance are integral to our enquiry into making and showing the work.

‘SPACING is an action of VISUAL APPREARANCE—overall’

Q. What were the research outcomes?

A&E: We began with forestry practice and planting as a basis for performance. Some of the outcomes are the films, the score, and the performance. On reviewing our video footage, we decided that Alison would create a series of edited options for us to review as part of our ongoing studio sessions. During this period Elaine was making choreography in response to the Kerouac’s Sea poem, and, to do this, recorded herself reciting it at various speeds and volumes. Alison also began writing a the poetry text based on the contents pages of the forestry book pages, which we had both agreed held visual and verbal poetic possibilities for us.

Our studio practice model is to get as many individual poetic elements on the go as early as possible, so we can use our studio time to exchange, develop and to explore each element collaboratively.

Our shared interests are in the processes and the creative acts of making and performing work. As such, questions of making and processes as a method of enquiry are a recurring mode of our studio practice. For example, with this work, each time we met in the studio we would start by sharing any responses we had made independently since our last meeting as starting points for our session.

These sharings often triggered responses that led to the creation of new elements for performance. For example, I responded to Elaine’s Kerouac-poem-inspired choreography by writing ‘harvest.’ This poem is primarily written from texts found in the forestry books and is set within the template of the poetic form of Kerouac’s ‘Sea.’

Our collaborative approach is to produce work for performance through an extension of our experimental studio methods. As the piece developed, we decided that Elaine would perform her ‘harvesting’ movement in a spot-lit area and that I would project, via a handheld projector, images of the diagrams of tree felling and sky-lining on to her. This film is made from the black and white photographic imagery found in the forestry books. The ‘harvesting’ poem doesn’t accompany the ‘harvesting’ choreography. Instead, we treat each performative element as materials or layers that we combine through finding new ways of working together. Unspoken understandings of how we might respond and what works in creating poetics also come into play.

‘Of A. planting of the whole subject’

Q. What do we mean by performance & how does performance constitute research?

A&E. For us, performance
is the site of investigation. The performance may hold other questions and
investigations, most obviously in the form of manifestos and performed lecture
texts. There are different modes of performance within each work. Each of these
modes could exist singularly but in the instance of the particular performance are
parts of the whole.

In recent years,
the academic conference format has allowed us to show our work in a space where
there is critical feedback but the expectation of the audience is not necessarily
framed by theatrical expectations or might not allow us to question theatrical
norms. In a conference space there is the expectation that things might exist
across and between art forms, that we might present something that is in
progress and that performance as research might be welcomed.

We step between reading, moving, speaking, visual images and film, staging, sitting and watching as a way of making a space.

Poetic Matter is a collaborative project between Alison Gibb
and Elaine Thomas. Alison Gibb is a poet-artist and researcher. She recently
completed her PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London. Elaine Thomas holds
an MFA in Choreography. She is a senior lecture in dance at Roehampton
University. Together they have presented work at a number of arts festivals and
academic conferences. For further info visit, please https://www.alisongibb.com/collaboration